Comment by ks2048
2 days ago
Speaking of old-timers and "inference time" - there was a time when "inference" meant inferring parameters from data (i.e. training). And now it means "test-time". (or maybe the difference is if it's statistics community vs ML community).
e.g. Bishop's textbook says:
5.2.4 Inference and decision
We have broken the classification problem down into two separate stages, the inference stage in which we use training data to learn a model for p(Ck|x) and the subsequent decision stage in which we use these posterior probabilities to make op- timal class assignments.
I almost mentioned "inference" too, as an unfortunate word that stuck in a bad way, but it's tolerable since we can now just [falsely] claim that the AI is "inferring" what a prompt "means" in order to answer it.
And speaking of word definitions: "Old Timer" is anyone with a decade more experience than you.